Jack McDevitt - Infinity Beach

“Let’s go,” he grumbled, pulling up his jacket collar and stuffing his hands into his pockets.

She turned up the heat in her jacket, and they started for the trees. Their boots crunched in the snow. The wind blew in steadily off the lake and they walked with their backs to it. Neither tried to talk until they’d made it to the shelter of the forest.

“You okay?” he asked when they were in the trees. His hair was already covered with blown snow.

“I’m fine.” It was a deep hood and she felt as if she were looking out of a tunnel.

He pointed the way and took the lead. Overhead, something shook snow out of the branches.

Kim looked up, and wondered about the wildlife. “Solly,” she whispered, “are there, do you suppose, any animals here we need to worry about? Cougars, maybe? Or bears?” The terraformers in their wisdom had neglected nothing. Greenway even had mosquitoes.

“I never thought of it. I don’t know.”

“Are you by any chance carrying a weapon?”

“No,” he said. “If we run into something, we’ll beat it off with a stick.”

“Good,” she grinned. “Nothing like being prepared.”

They pushed through thick brambles and shrubbery, crossed glades, and eventually found a trail that seemed to be going in their direction.

They passed a collapsed house, entangled in new-growth trees, almost invisible until they were within a couple of meters. And a,bench, incongruously set off to one side of the trail. “This was probably the way to the beach at one time,” Solly said.

She looked at her map. “Yes. Here it is.”

“How’re we doing?”

“Headed in the right direction. It’s not much farther.”

“You don’t think we ought to come back and do this in the morning?”

“We’re here now, Solly. Let’s just take a quick look, so I can say I’ve been here, and then we can head out.”

After Tripley’s disappearance, the villa and its furnishings had been willed to Sara Baines, his mother. According to the reports, Sara had closed up the house, but had been unable to sell it. The town was emptying out; people had too many bad memories, there were doubts whether the rest of the mountain might come down, the dam could go at any time.

So nobody had really lived in the house since Tripley came back from that last flight.

They left the trail at a glade with a tumbled shed, clumped through a stream, skidded down a slope, and got confused about directions because nobody had thought to bring a compass. “Don’t blame me,” said Solly. “I thought we were going to sit in the flyer and look at the lake.”

Kim was now in the lead. The trees closed in again. In some places the snow was too deep for her hiking shoes. It got down her ankles, and her feet got cold.

It was hard to keep a sense of direction. On one occasion they came out in a swampy area along the lake shore. They turned back, retraced their steps for about a hundred paces, and struck off in a new direction. Kim had never been a hiking enthusiast, and she was beginning to have second thoughts when the ground started to rise.

“This might be it,” she said. “The place was on the brow of a low hill.”

It was a slippery climb. They took turns falling down and suddenly they were tumbling in the snow and Solly, who probably would have preferred to look irritable, couldn’t resist laughing.

But they got to the summit, and there it stood!

Whatever lawn might have once existed behind a peeling wooden fence had been swallowed by bushes, weeds, and shrubbery. The villa itself lay in a tangle of spruce and oak trees. Vines had grown over it and the wind had taken the roof off. The front door was missing.

She played her lantern across it and compared it with pictures she’d brought. “Yes,” she said. “This is it. No question.”

They circled around to the rear. A side wall had collapsed. Windows were broken, frames shattered. An oak was threatening to push over the east wing.

It was made mostly of brick. Two stories, glass dome, oval windows, rotunda, turret. None of that cheap mass-produced stuff for Kile Tripley. Kim stood in the snow, transfixed by the ruin.

“What are you thinking?”

“About transience, I guess. I was wondering if Emily was ever here.”

Followed by Solly, she stepped over the threshold into the rotunda. It was good to get out of the wind. She flashed her beam around the interior, which the elements had destroyed. Overhead, two stories up, the dome was covered with dirt and vegetation. During Tripley’s time it would have revealed the stars.

The walls were mottled and crumbling. A sagging staircase arced up to the second floor where it became a circular balcony. There were several doorways on both levels, and a fireplace on the lower.

One door hung out of its frame. Others were missing altogether. A central corridor opened off the rear of the rotunda directly in front of her and ran to the back of the house. Solly pointed his lamp into it, and they saw at the far end a flight of stairs leading down.

The floor creaked. “Careful where you put your weight,” he said.

Everything was covered with leaves and dirt. The ground-level rooms looked empty. Kim swung her lamp beam up, trying to see through the second-floor doorways. Shadows moved around the walls.

“I don’t think we’ll find much here,” Solly said.

Claws scrabbled across a hard surface. An animal retreated from the light, but she couldn’t see what it was.

“Probably a squirrel,” said Solly.

“Or a rat.”

The wind howled around the house. Branches creaked.

Had she been alone, she would have called it off at that point and gone back to the flyer. She had met, and exceeded, her obligation to Sheyel. To Emily.

But they’d come all this way and Solly would expect her at least to look in the rooms.

Stairs first. Go up and confront the rat. Solly took the lead, testing each step as they went. The entire structure swayed and sank under their weight. Near the top a board gave way underfoot. He lost his balance and grabbed the banister, which sagged outward. Solly would have gone down the quick way had Kim not grabbed him and hauled him back. She took a moment to compare herself favorably with the young woman at the Germane Society.

“This might not be a really good idea,” he said, shaken. They went cautiously the rest of the way to the top and peeked quickly through each doorway. In some, ceilings had given way. The rooms were filled with dirt and dry leaves. Carpets had turned to mold.

They found a broken bed frame and a bureau with no drawers, a smashed table, a couple of chairs. The smell of the place was strong.

Pipes stuck out from broken walls. Basins, tubs, and showers were filled with the detritus of decades.

They went back downstairs.

The rooms at ground level were not quite so ill-used because they were slightly less open to the elements. But here again no usable furniture was left. Cables hung out of ceilings, the floors were in a state of decay, and they found a dead, half-eaten squirrel in a corner behind a collapsed table whose top, when she cleared it off, had a chessboard design. Kim had read somewhere that Kane enjoyed the game and wondered whether he and Tripley had ever played here. And if so, who had won.

She crossed to the kitchen and dining areas, found a broken chair and shattered pottery. Weeds pushed up through the floor.

Solly was standing in the middle of the rotunda, idly shining his lamp around, bored, shivering, ready to go.

Kim walked back to the down-stairway at the rear of the house. “Let’s take a quick look,” she said, testing the handrail.

“Careful,” he cautioned.

The stairs sank under her weight. “Maybe you should stay here,” she said. “I’m not sure it’ll support you.”